legendary river—something he called a “Jewish tragedy.” The learned geogra-
pher ridiculed the lack of geographic knowledge displayed by Jewish writers
and could not resist a witticism concerning “the Sabbatical river: now you shall
understand how the Jews generally drowned their wits therein.” He had as his
two examples “Rambam [Maimonides; 1135 – 1204 ] who called it [the River]
Gozan,” and Eldad Ha-Dani, whose story should serve as “favorable entertain-
ment.” Purchas tells a version of Eldad’s story, which he claims to have read in
a “translation of Ge ́nebrard.”^18 Fable or not, Purchas did not deny the existence
of the “closed Jews” and encouraged his reader to become acquainted with the
fascinating story of the “traveler Eldad.”
From still earlier times, readers had available to them the Latin transla-
tions of Benjamin of Tudela, published in Antwerp in 1575. These placed the
tribes in Central Asia, Ethiopia, and Arabia. In 1691 , the great Arabist and
scholar of Islam Thomas Hyde ( 1636 – 1703 ) published theItinera Mundi,a
bilingual Hebrew and Latin edition of Abraham Farissol’sIgeret Orhot ‘Olam.^19
TheIgeret,it should be recalled, had placed the tribes in India and in Tap-
robanne (Sri Lanka), the old Far East of the Romanoikoumene.But it was not
only Jewish thinkers who were “drowning their wits” when it came to the
matter. So were Christian ones.
Churchill’sCollection of Voyages and Travels,which reached final shape in
1732 , dedicated pages to the possibility that the ten tribes were in China, only to
negate it by publicizing the views of Domingo Ferna ́ndez Navarrete (c. 1610 –
1689 ), a leading Dominican missionary who debated the issue. The Chinese
could not be Israelites, insisted Navarrete, since “China was ancienter than the
captivity of the ten tribes.”^20 Navarrete also refuted similar suggestions of the
Jesuit Joa ̃o Rodriguez ( 1558 – 1633 ). Rodriguez, who spent his lifetime in Japan,
had ended his great dissertation on the Japanese language with the suggestion
that the great Chinese thinker Confucius and some other Chinese originated
in the ten lost tribes.Travels of the Jesuits, into Various Parts of the World,
published in London in 1762 , also discussed Jesuit reports that people in
India, China, or Japan could be the tribes’ offspring. The book’s English editor,
John Lockman ( 1698 – 1771 ), cited a long list of sources—Eldad, Benjamin of
Tudela, and Farissol, among others—in an attempt to evaluate the Jesuit
accounts. The deliberations over the subject thus included medieval sources,
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Jesuit accounts, and eighteenth-century
editorial opinions, all massed together in a few brief pages. After much
deliberation, it seems that all that Lockman could say was “some remains of
[the] ten tribes existed in Upper Asia.”^21
Perhaps the final stamp on the ten tribes as a modern geographic
mystery—indeed, a modern geographic problem—came with James Rennell’s
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